SOURCE: Frost, William P. “Joseph Campbell's Views on the Oneness of Jesus and His Father.” In Following Joseph Campbell's Lead in the Search for Jesus' Father, pp. 77-96. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Frost considers Campbell's treatment of Judeo-Christian mythology.]

Besides the canonical biblical books (those officially approved by the hierarchy of Christianity and the Jewish authorities) there exists what is called “The Other Bible.” Willis Barnstone edited The Other Bible; on the cover is printed, “For the first time in one volume ancient esoteric texts from: the pseudopigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the early Kabbalah, the Nag Hammadi Library, and other sources.” This refers to the fact that orthodox Jews and Christians were very selective in picking those sources which promoted their own belief systems and doctrines. The other sources were regarded heretical, and some of the devil.

Campbell was not just a student of such non-canonical sources, he also was well at home with stories, myths, and texts of the Ancient Near East: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Semitic cultures, especially Babylon and the Hebrew tradition. In such comparative studies he learned to appreciate the similarities and the differences, as well as the historical developments by which such cultures became characterized. Such universal interpretations (recognition of common elements) were very much fostered by Carl G. Jung's understanding of archetypes, the collective unconscious (where all those archetypes find an umbrella existence) and the interpretations of dreams according to pertaining symbols. (Campbell was the author of The Portable Jung.) As such he could make comparisons between the biblical imagery and the images used in Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Babylonian myths. Within the biblical tradition of the Old Testament there were political groups, which did not agree with each other and also opposed each other. In his book, Wisdom in Israel, Gerhard Von Rad, describes such a case.

Although part of the Hebrew culture, Judaism arose as a tradition during the Babylonian Exile, when the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar led a substantial portion of the Judaites into captivity. This occurred in the last part of the Sixth Century B. C. E. The temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the circumstances did not allow for temple rituals, which were the center of identity. The cult was replaced by a stronger adherence to God's law, the Torah, which would hold people together in their tradition. The written word was portable; it was contained on scrolls of parchment. It was open for everyone to read, and as such one could take the word of God wherever one traveled. The synagogues became the religious gathering places, and the religious authority changed from priests to those laymen who studied God's laws, the Rabbis.

This Judaism became concerned with the regulations of the practical life and the interpretations of historical events. At its center is Yahweh. This God is very exclusive and benevolent to those who deserve his blessings. The dispute about the way in which the blessing would be bestowed upon people became the cause of internal debates and struggles.

One group simply maintained that the divine blessings will come as a consequence of being faithful to God's rules about their daily lives. This is the Deuteronomic tradition. Another group held that there was also a definite wisdom within the created reality, which needed to be discovered and studied more fully. This insight was held in various ways by the Wisdom literature. A segment of this Wisdom believed that divine blessings do not solely depend upon obedience to the Torah but may result from a reasonable response to the divine truth within creation.

The Deuteronomic tradition is the orthodox mentality within Judaism. The Wisdom approach is more enlightened in terms of reason, human philosophy, meditation, and forms of mystical experiences. It can be noted that the orthodox position contains a degree of Wisdom mentality insofar as they allow themselves on expectation of blessings as a result of a faithfulness to the Torah. They held it to be reasonable that God would reward his servants for having done good works. However, this reasoning was checked with the awareness that the hope for blessings is ultimately based on a revealed promise as part of the covenant. It does not refer to a causality as strongly as is the case in Wisdom literature. The latter holds that there is a certain order at the heart of God's creation. A life lived in accordance with this order can be expected to be a rewarding life. This reward is then understood in terms of cause and effect.

The two traditions were already present before the Babylonian Exile. The orthodox had acquired political power under the reign of King Josiah. He had been inspired by the discovery of scrolls, which contained regulations and were perceived to be God's law. Josiah awakened the hopes of his people by promoting their obedience to these divine rules, with the promise that God would bring his reward in the form of a much needed national stability and prosperity. It was a re-grouping movement of the people in Judah in their search for identity. They had allowed themselves significant communications with other cultures. This interchange had produced a syncretic mentality and a spirit of enlightenment. The traditional identity had suffered substantially. The resurgence of orthodoxy established a needed security. The political power was in the hands of the Zadokite priests, who organized a hierocratic order. The promotors of the Wisdom tradition came into discredit, although they remained a significant force in the historical development of Judaism.

With the Babylonian Exile, the two groups continued their struggle for power and acceptance. On the one hand there was a concern for the perpetuation of the nation which focused on a return to Jerusalem, their holy city, and the rebuilding of the temple. Quite different were the voices of the known prophets of those days, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah. They were not against the rebuilding of the temple, but did not hold this to be the exclusive center of hope. Jeremiah and Ezekiel promoted aspects of an individualized religion where God speaks in the heart of people. They wanted to educate the exiled in an understanding of wider perspectives, which superseded their nationalistic beliefs. God's power was explained as being at work in all nations and in all of history. Redemption should not be expected exclusively from the temple cult.

After the exile, the orthodox tradition was victorious in the power struggle. The Wisdom-oriented group, which favored adaptation and openness to new perspectives, became more alienated. Initially, they maintained a certain hope for the future based on the dynamism of the wisdom within God's creation. This cosmic source would made goodness emerge as a distinct realm of God's realized glory, God's kingdom. (Thus the divine energy of the Father is within the cosmos and within the individual.)

Von Rad holds that the growing alienation of the Wisdom mentality resulted in a pessimism regarding the coming of God's kingdom, based on human efforts in response to wisdom within creation. Redemption came to be expected from God's dramatic intervention within history. God was to bring about the needed transformation. The proportions of these transformations became more radical and grew in scope. Visionaries described their cosmic dimensions which would pertain to all of creation. This was the origin of Apocalyptic literature. Von Rad believes the new emergent to be based on the Wisdom tradition.

It should be noted that the Wisdom as a dynamic energy within all of creation was never an independent power but was explained as an expression of God's created goodness. Von Rad phrased this insight well. “Indeed, it was precisely because this knowledge of Yahweh was so strong, so unassailable, that Israel was able to speak of the orders of this world in quite secular terms” (63).

As a summary, the following events describe the drastic cultural changes during the Exilic Age: a) deterioration of the Jewish nationalism; b) External cultural influences from Babylonian and Hellenic civilization promoted the development of rationality; c) The Prophets emphasized the significance of a personalized religiousness, which caused a metamorphosis, diminishing the nationalistic collectivity; d) The development of personalized religiosity gave rise to a concern for individual justice in the context of undeserved suffering of the righteous, e.g., Job.

Von Rad explains how Job's final solution to the problem was not merely a submission to God's will. This would have been the orthodox mentality. It was Yahweh's reference to the greatness and incomprehensible majesty of His creations, Wisdom's appreciation of creation, which made Job see that God can be trusted. Job's suffering was not the result of unfaithfulness to God's Law. The suffering was to be understood within the incomprehensible greatness of God, whose majesty supersedes our minute sense of justice and fairness. God's justice is greater than we ever will know, and it should not be subjected exclusively to our human criteria.

Although one of the last canonical books of the Old Testament, Daniel has a definite apocalyptic character, the real apocalyptic writings originated in the last two centuries before Christ. Generally they are products of the “intertestamental” period (between the Old and the New Testament). They are known as Jewish pseudopigraphs, that is, scriptures, usually from the intertestamental period, attributed to an assumed great name of the Old Testament. They are noncanonical and were composed mostly in Palestine and Egypt, where the Jews living outside their land (in the Diaspora) created Graeco-Jewish literature. They also belong to the apocryphal books or “hidden” books which claim divine authorship which is denied by Jewish and Christian authorities. They are extremely valuable for understanding the popular beliefs of Judaism and New Testament times and tracing those traditions which were declared “heretical” by the orthodox religions. What happened to the religious imagination of the Jewish tradition in those days is well summarized by Conrad L'Huereux in an unpublished paper, “Cultural Anthropology and the Death-Immortality Dialog.”

For a long time Israel clung stubbornly to the idea that God was just and so he must reward those who are faithful to him and punish sinners. Since, in the early period, there was effectively no belief in an afterlife, this reward and punishment must be found in the present life. Historical experience, however, did not support this belief in divine justice and retribution. For one could find just and pious men who suffered in life whereas there were wicked unfaithful men who lived long and happy lives. This contradiction between theological conviction and historical experience is the principle cause of the emergence of belief in reward for the just after death. So we see that from biblical perspectives, belief in a blessed afterlife is not a presupposition or first principle of faith, but a conclusion arrived at because it was the only way to reconcile an apparent contradiction.

(Department of Religious Studies, University of Dayton, Ohio, 1972)

Wolfhart Pannenberg complements these insights by observing that, with the rise of individualism, the meaning of the individual's life on earth was not completely understandable. (See Theology Digest). He emphasizes how the fellowship with God expressed in Psalm 73 gives the worshipper an experience which supersedes his own mortality. Pannenberg concludes that hope for an afterlife has its origin in this religious fellowship with the immortal God.

                    How good God is to the upright;
the Lord to those who are clean of heart!
But, as for me, I almost lost my balance;
my feet all but slipped,
because I was envious of the arrogant when
I saw them prosper though they were wicked.
For they are in no pain;
their bodies are sound and sleek'
they are free from the burdens of mortals,
and are not afflicted like the rest of men.
So pride adorns them as a necklace;
as a robe violence enwraps them …

(1-6)

                    Because my heart was embittered.
and my soul pierced,
I was stupid and understood not;
I was like a brute beast in your presence.
                    Yet with you I shall always be;
you have hold of my right hand;
with your counsel you guide me, and in the end you will receive
me in your glory.
Whom else have I in heaven?
And when I am with you,
the earth delights me not.
Though my flesh and my heart waste away,
God is the rock and my portion forever. …

(21-26)

Additional insights pertain to the martyrdom of the righteous. Many scholars recognize the tragedy as a source of apocalyptic thought. In his book Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism, George W. E. Nickelsburg elaborates on this martyrdom aspect. He delineated developments within literature which deal with this theme. In the segment, “The Story of the Righteous Man and the Isaianic Exaltation Tradition” (170), he observes how initially the righteous, who is condemned to death, is rescued and exalted to a high position. In later literature (the Wisdom of Solomon), changes emerged. The protagonist was put to death but was vindicated and honored in the heavenly court, where he became a high ranking official.

The above references to the presence of the Wisdom tradition before and during the Babylonian Exile, and the development of the intertestamental Apocalyptic literature at the end of the Old Testament period, indicate the difference from the orthodox tradition. In the intertestamental period and especially in the first century C. E., there is the birth of a new Jewish tradition—Gnosticism. Although Gnosticism consists of a wide variety of schools and espouses at the times opposing ideas, still, they can be fitted under one umbrella. As such, Gnostics believe that salvation was to be achieved by a special or esoteric knowledge. Evil was explained in the belief that at the beginning, before creation, there were two opposing principles, light versus dark, or goodness versus evil. Creation is really an act by some dumb Creator who mixed those two together in the formation of reality. The only way to become liberated from such a captivity within the claws of the dark, is to obtain a special enlightenment, gnosis. It is rooted in the Wisdom and Apocalyptic tradition which had definite expectations about created reality and its future, but became frustrated. This frustration became amplified especially in the first century C. E. with the destruction of the temple. Everything went wrong; there was no way out of this predicament. Moreover, the tradition teachings about a Creator God did not make sense at all. The orthodox teachings proved to be irrelevant; moreover they deserved to be ridiculed and exposed as erroneous. Everything of the tradition, paradise, Adam and Eve, the serpent and the Tree of Life, the expulsion from Paradise, Noah's ark and the flood, the Creation of the world, the Messiah, Heaven, and Hell, Wisdom and righteousness needed to be interpreted anew according to this gnosis. This one finds in the early gnostic literature which is originally Jewish.

The first Christians were Jews, and many of them developed their Christian identity in gnostic terms. The orthodox church of Jerusalem reacted strongly against the gnostic interpretation of the Christian faith. They tried hard to keep gnostic ideas out of the scriptures which were to represent their beliefs. In this the orthodox church was not totally successful, because there are many gnostic ideas within the New Testament texts. The gnostic writings were considered among the apocryphal books, which were not inspired by God. For a long time orthodox Christianity was successful in suppressing these writings; that is why they were “hidden” (in Greek apokryphos). Shortly after World War II, the secret scriptures of the Gnostics were discovered near the Upper Nile city of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. They are now known as the Nag Hammadi Library. Most of the Nag Hammadi texts became available only in the mid-1970s.

Already in 1925 the renowned New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, concluded that early Christianity formed itself according to a Gnostic redeemer myth, where Jesus is a divine figure “sent down from the celestial light, the Son of the Most High coming forth from the Father, veiled in earthly form and inaugurating the redemption through his work.” Here is John Dart's description in his book, The Laughing Savior:

The Gnostic myth tells the fate of the soul, man's true inner self represented as “a spark of a heavenly figure of light, the original man.” In primordial times, demonic powers of darkness conquer this figure of light, tearing him into shreds.

The sparks of light are used by the demons to “create a world out of the chaos of darkness as a counterpart of the world of light, of which they were jealous.” The demons closely guarded the elements of light enclosed in humans. “The demons endeavor to stupefy them and make them drunk, sending them to sleep and making them forget their heavenly home.” Some people nevertheless become conscious of their heavenly origin and of the alien nature of the world. They [the Gnostics] yearn for deliverance.

“The supreme deity takes pity on the imprisoned sparks of light, and sends down the heavenly figure of light, his Son, to redeem them. This Son arrays himself in the garment of the earthly body, lest the demons should recognize him. He invites his own to join him, awakens them from their sleep, reminds them of their heavenly home, and teaches them about the way to return.

The redeemer teaches them sacred and secret passwords, for the souls will have to pass different spheres of the planets, watchposts of the demonic cosmic powers. “After accomplishing his work, he ascends and returns to heaven again to prepare a way for his own to follow him. This they will do when they die …”

The redeemer's work will be completed when he is able to reassemble all the sparks of light in heaven. That done, the world will come to an end, returning to its original chaos. “The darkness is left to itself, and that is the judgment.”

(45-46)

Obviously, much of the Gnostic myth is present in the gospel of John. It is certainly a challenge to read this gospel from a gnostic viewpoint rather than with the eyes of the traditional Christian worldview. The orthodox Christian worldview is very simple. There is one God, who is the creative principle of all existence. Initially everything was fine (Paradise). But the disobedience of the first man and his wife caused the birth of evil. In his goodness, the Creator God promises a messiah. The birth of Jesus and his death on the cross resulted in the bodily resurrection by which Jesus became the Christ. This Christ is the second person of the Divine Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One can become part of this divine life if one is baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as demanded by Jesus. Creation is simply a temporary reality which will be superseded by Heaven, which the Father created since the beginning of time. Our sins are washed away by Christ's blood on the cross. The life of Christ is to be found in His true church, Christianity. The religion preaches an almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, and everything is regulated and ruled by Him. Total obedience to His word will secure eternal life. Life itself is just one of those things that shall be subjugated to God's laws. Life itself needs to be redeemed because it is not yet sufficiently spiritualized. Plato's perception of the soul being incarcerated in the body has permeated much of Christianity. In fact, the doctrine of soul is typically Platonic. In the Bible, the soul is not an independent spiritual being. Even the inventor of Christianity, Saint Paul, did not believe in a soul. For him, death was like going to sleep. What awaits the dead is the resurrection of the body, which is a transformation. Not the life of the spirit, because that would be gnostic, and Paul fought against gnosticism, but the resurrection of the body is promised.

The above paragraph was intended to indicate that orthodox Christianity became a very particular form within the Christian reality. Some people assume that the first Christians were orthodox and that later the gnostic version emerged. This becomes highly debatable if one learns that one of the gnostic writings, The Gospel of Thomas, is considered as being older than the four gospels in the New Testament. This gnostic gospel is a compilation of Jesus' sayings which some of those sayings seem more original than similar ones within the canonical gospels. (See Dart's The Laughing Savior, 15, 91-96.)

Joseph Campbell refers repeatedly to The Gospel of Thomas. Before going into his interpretations and use of such a gnostic text, more needs to be explained about these writings.

John Dart devotes a number of chapters to making the connection between the gnostic writings and the Jewish tradition, and also a few chapters to indicate the Christian nature of this particular gnosticism. In Chapter Nine, “The Envious God,” he discusses the Christian Gnostic work, “The Testimony of Truth.” There is a retelling of the Genesis story. There the serpent is regarded as “wiser” (not “more cunning”) than all the animals, and he promises Eve that the eating of the apple will open “the eyes of her heart.” After the eating of the apple God asked “Where are you?” “The Testimony of Truth” ridicules this:

What sort is he, this God?

First, [he] envied Adam that he should eat from the tree of knowledge. And secondly he said, Adam, “where are you?”

And God does not have foreknowledge: that is, since he did not know (it) from the beginning.

[And] afterwards he said, “Let us cast him [out] of this place, lest he eat of the tree of life and live for ever.”

Surely he has shown himself to be an envious slanderer. And what kind of God is this? For great is the blindness of the commandments; and did they not reveal him? And he said, “I am the jealous God; I will bring the sins of the fathers upon the children until three (and) four generations”

[see Exod. 20:5]

And he said, “I will make their heart thick, and I will cause their mind to become blind, that they might not know nor comprehend the things he has said to those who believe in him [and] serve him!

(Dart, 63)

Obviously, the author is very much interested in wisdom and turned off by the Creator God of the Genesis story. In this context, a reference can be made to Joseph Campbell's personal experience as told in the television program “Joseph Campbell: A Profile.” Once, in Japan, he was at the entrance of a Buddhist shrine, with a Buddha seated under the Tree of Immortal Life. At the gate were statues of two guardians. At that moment Campbell realized that they reminded him of the cherubim with the flaming sword, which God had placed east of the Garden of Eden to guard the way of the tree (Gen. 3:24). Campbell reflected further that this guard is our belief in a Creator God whom we make all important. Then the wisdom of life is obliterated and inaccessible. Campbell is well prepared to speak about God in terms beyond the Creator God. He definitely learned about this in the Hindu tradition, where the divine supersedes the God of creation in the eternal presence of Brahman. The creator is simply an expression of one of the innumerable divine possibilities. A mystical awareness of the Brahman, the eternal, goes beyond a creation-oriented concern. Here are two references from Campbell's The Power of Myth.

And the cherubim at the gate—who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you'll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed—fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you're approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won't be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through. We're kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.

MOYERS:
Have all men at all times felt some sense of exclusion from an ultimate reality, from bliss, from delight, from perfection, from God?
CAMPBELL:
Yes, but then you have moments of ecstasy. The difference between everyday life and living in those moments of ecstasy is the difference between being outside and inside the Garden. You go past your fear and desire, past the pair of opposites.
MOYERS:
Into harmony?
CAMPBELL:
Into transcendence. This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness of life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier. This is the God.

(107)

The other reference is from the chapter, “Masks of Eternity.”

MOYERS:
How does one have a profound experience?
CAMPBELL:
By having a profound sense of the mystery.
MOYERS:
But if God is the god we have only imagined, how can we stand in awe of our creation?
CAMPBELL:
How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”
The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas, and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short-circuit the transcendent, connoted experience. An intense experience of the mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience.
MOYERS:
There are many Christians who believe that, to find out who Jesus is, you have to go past the Christian faith, past the Christian doctrine, past the Christian Church—
CAMPBELL:
You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier …

(209)

These references to Campbell illustrate why the Gnostic writings put down the Creator-God in the Genesis story. Another point of interest in Dart's book is the portrayal of the serpent as being “wise.” This is explained according to two Gnostic writings: “The Nature of the Archons,” and “On the Origin of the World.” The first one starts as follows:

Above, in the infinite aeons, is Imperishability. Sophia, she who is called Pistis, wanted to make a work by herself, without her partner. And her work became the images of heaven. There is a curtain between those above and the aeons which are beneath.

(Dart, 68)

In “The Origin of the World” we read:

Sophia sent Zoe, her daughter, who is called “Eve,” as an instructor in order that she might rise up Adam, in whom there is no psyche [soul] so that those whom he would beget might become vessels of light. When Eve saw her companion-likeness cast down she pitied him, and she said, “Adam, live! Rise up upon the earth!”

Immediately her words became a work for when Adam rose up, immediately he opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, “You will be called ‘mother of the living’ because you are the one who gave life to me.”

(70)

In “The Nature of the Archons,” Sophia enters the serpent, who then acquires the name Instructor. “On the Origin of the World” holds that Sophia created the Instructor to teach Adam and Eve the truth about their origins. In the serpent one hears the voice of Sophia or wisdom.

Then the one who is wiser than all of them, one who was called “the wild beast,” came. And when he saw the likeness of their mother, Eve, he said to her: “What is it that god said to you?—“Do not eat from the tree of knowledge?” She said: “He said not only ‘Do not eat from it’ but ‘Do not touch it, lest you die.’”

He said to her, “Don't be afraid. You will surely not [die], for [he knows] that when you eat from it your mind will be sobered and you will become like the gods, knowing the distinctions which exist between the human evil and the good. For he said this to you, being jealous lest you eat from it.” Then Eve was confident of the words of the instructor, and she peered into the tree …

(71)

Dart explains that after the eating of the fruit, the archons questioned Adam and Eve and learned what the serpent had done. They tried to approach the serpent-Instructor, but he blinded their eyes. Then the archons cursed Eve and later Adam and everything that had been created.

It is obvious that the patriarchal orthodox tradition has discriminated against women in significant ways. The Gnostic writings try to counteract this sick fear of the feminine. The two sources mentioned above report stories of Eve being raped by the descendants of darkness but the wisdom of Eve superseded the evil of this act. In another story the wife of Noah, Norea, is refused entrance into the Ark by Noah. Dart writes:

Norea cries for help from the highest God, and a golden angel clothed in snowy white descends from heaven, causing the archons to withdraw.

“Who are you?” asked Norea.

“It is I who am Eleleth, Sagacity, the Great Angel who stands in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I have been sent to speak with you and save you from the grasp of the Lawless.

And I shall teach you about your Root,” said the angel.

(75)

Studies by George MacRae suggests that the Gnostic Sophia is very much influenced by the Jewish Wisdom as found in the Old Testament's Proverbs.

The Lord begot me, the firstborn of his ways, the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago, from of old I was poured forth, at the first, before the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains or springs of water; before the mountains were settled into place, before the hills, I was brought forth.

(8:22-25)

The Gnostic Sophia is “a breath of the power of God, who breathes life into a shapeless mass to form Ialdabaoth (the Supreme Lord) and she breathes life into Adam. (Dart, 78) This is quite different from the male chauvinism of the orthodox biblical tradition. Still one more character is to be introduced to become aware of the main symbolic or mythical figures in the Gnostic writings. It is the son of Adam, Seth. In his Patterns in Comparative Religion, Mircea Eliade narrates the version which he considered the most widely accepted:

When Adam had lived for 932 years in the Hebron valley, he was struck down with a fatal illness and sent his son Seth to ask the angel who stood guard at the gate of Paradise for the oil of mercy. Seth follows the tracks of Adam and Eve's footsteps, where the grass has never grown and, coming to Paradise, he imparts Adam's wish to the archangel. The archangel advises him to look three times to Paradise. The first time Seth sees the water from which four rivers flow, and a dried-up tree above it. The second time, a serpent coils itself round the trunk. The third time he looks, he sees the tree rise up to heaven; at its top is a newborn child (the Tree of Life stood at the centre of the universe and it passed as an axis through the three cosmic spheres). The angel tells Seth the meaning of what he has seen, and announces to him that a Redeemer is to come. At the same time he gives him three seeds from the fruit of the fatal tree of which his parents ate, and tells him to place them upon Adam's tongue; he says that Adam will die in three days. When Adam hears Seth's story he laughs (sign of Gnostic wisdom) for the first time since being banished from Paradise, for he realizes that mankind will be saved. When he dies, the three seeds Seth has placed on his tongue rise up in the valley of Hebron, three trees growing with a single span till the time of Moses. And he, knowing their divine origin, transplants them to Mount Tabor or Horeb (the “center of the world”).

The trees remain there for a thousand years till the day David gets an order from God to take them to Jerusalem (which is also a “centre”). After a great many further episodes (the Queen of Sheba refusing to place her foot on their wood, etc.), the three trees become one tree, and the cross of the Redeemer is made of it. The blood of Christ, crucified at the centre of the Earth, on the very spot where Adam was created and buried, falls upon “the skull of Adam”, and thus, redeeming him from his sin, baptizes the father of mankind.

(293)

Dart's book, The Laughing Savior, receives focus in Chapter Sixteen, “The Laughing Jesus.” In the Gnostic writings, Jesus, when nailed on the cross, does not really suffer pain. Only the body knows pain. Jesus laughs about those who cling to his dead body, which is not the life-giving savior, the revealer of the true gnosis. In the “Second Treatise of the Great Seth” the speaker is presumably Jesus Christ:

It was not I whom they struck with the reed. It was another who lifted the cross onto his shoulders—Simon. It was another on whose head they placed the thorny crown. But I was up above, rejoicing over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring of the error of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance.

(Dart, 108)

These references to the Gnostic writings will make Campbell's interpretation of Jesus and his Father more understandable. A selection of some significant statements about Jesus expresses Campbell's delight in this heroic messiah.

In The Power of Myth references to Jesus and his Father include the following:

The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on Holy Rood, the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree of knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the father are one.

(107)

CAMPBELL:
I live with these myths, and they tell me this all the time. This is the problem that can be metaphorically understood as identifying with the Christ in you. The Christ in you doesn't die. The Christ in you survives death and resurrects …

(39)

There is an equivalent scene described in the apocryphal Christian Acts of John, immediately before Jesus goes to be crucified. This is one of the most moving passages in Christian literature. In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels, it is simply mentioned that, at the conclusion of the celebration of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before he went forth. But in the Acts of John, we have a word-for-word account of the whole singing of the hymn. Just before going out into the garden at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus says to the company, “Let us dance!” And they all hold hands in a circle, and as they circle around him, Jesus sings, “Glory be to thee, Father!” To which the circle company responds, “Amen.”

“Glory be to thee, Word!”

And again, “Amen.”

“I would be born and I would bear!”

“Amen.”

“I would eat and I would be eaten!”

“Amen.”

“Thou that dancest, see what I do, for thine is the passion of the manhood, which I am about to suffer!”

“Amen.”

“I would flee and I would stay!”

“Amen.”

“I would be united and I would unite!”

“Amen.”

“A door am I to thee that knocketh at me … A way am I to thee, a wayfarer.” And when the dance is ended, he walks out of the garden to be taken and crucified.

When you go to your death that was, as a god, in the knowledge of the myth, you are going to your eternal life. So what is there in that to be sad about? Let us make it magnificent—as it is. Let us celebrate it.

(109)

Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it. That's exactly the theme of Paul's statement about Christ in his Epistle to the Philippians: that Jesus “did not think Godhood something to be held to but took the form of a servant here on earth, even to death on the cross.” That's a voluntary participation in the fragmentation of life.

MOYERS:
So you would agree with Abelard in the twelfth century, who said that Jesus' death on the cross was not as ransom paid, or as a penalty applied, but that it was an act of atonement, at-one-ment, with the race.
CAMPBELL:
That is the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified, or why he elected to be crucified. An earlier one was that the sin in the Garden of Eden had committed mankind to the Devil, and God had to redeem man from the pawnbroker, the Devil. So he offered his own son, Jesus, as the redemption. Pope Gregory gave this interpretation of Jesus as the bait that hooked the Devil. That's the redemption idea. In another version, God was so offended by the act of impudence in the Garden that he became wrathful and threw man out of his field of mercy, and then the only thing that could atone man with God was a sacrifice that would be as great in its importance as the sin had been. No mere man could make such a sacrifice so the son of God himself became man in order to pay the debt.
But Abelard's idea was that Christ came to be crucified to evoke in man's heart the sentiment of compassion for the suffering of life, and to remove man's mind from blind commitment to the goods of this world. It is in compassion with Christ that we turn to Christ, and the injured one becomes our Savior.

(112)

CAMPBELL:
Yes, the idea of the Goddess is related to the fact that you're born from your mother, and your father may be unknown to you, or the father may have died. Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest for his father.
In the story of the incarnation of Jesus, the father of Jesus was the father in heaven, at least in terms of the symbology. When Jesus goes to the cross, he is on the way to the father, leaving the mother behind. And the cross, which is symbolic of the earth, is the mother symbol. So on the cross, Jesus leaves his body on the mother, from which he has acquired his body, and he goes to the father, who is the ultimate transcendent mystery source.

(166)

MOYERS:
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker says to his companions, “I wish I had known my father.” There's something powerful in the image of the father quest. But why not mother quest?
CAMPBELL:
Well, the mother's right there. You're born from your mother, and she's the one who nurses you and instructs you and brings you up to the age when you must find your father.
Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There's a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it's your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolized by the father quest.
MOYERS:
So when you find your father, you find yourself?
CAMPBELL:
We have the word in English, “at-one-ment” with the father. You remember the story of Jesus lost in Jerusalem when he's a little boy about twelve years old. His parents hunt for him, and when they find him in the temple, in conversation with the doctors of the law, they ask, “Why did you abandon us this way? Why did you give us this fear and anxiety?” And he says, “Didn't you know that I had to be about my father's business?” He's twelve years old—that's the age of the adolescence initiations, finding who you are.

(166)

CAMPBELL:
It happens when you awaken at the level of the heart to compassion, compassion, shared suffering: experienced participation in the suffering of another person. That's the beginning of humanity. And the meditations of religion properly are on that level, the heart level.
MOYERS:
You say that's the beginning of humanity. But in these stories, that's the moment when gods are born. The virgin birth—it's a god who emerges.
CAMPBELL:
And do you know who that god is? It's you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there, and you think it's all out there. So you're thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered—out there. But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?
MOYERS:
Why is it significant that this is of a virgin?
CAMPBELL:
The begetter is of the spirit. This is a spiritual birth. The virgin conceived of the word through the ear.

(174)

MOYERS:
Of course, the heart of the Christian faith is that God was in Christ, that these elemental forces you're talking about embodied themselves in a human being who reconciled mankind to God.
CAMPBELL:
Yes, and the basic Gnostic and Buddhist idea is that that is true of your and me as well. Jesus was a historical person who realized in himself that he and what he called the Father were one, and he lived out of that knowledge of the Christhood of his nature.
I remember, I was once giving a lecture in which I spoke about living out of the sense of the Christ in you, and a priest in the audience (as I was later told) turned to the woman beside him and whispered, “That's blasphemy.”
MOYERS:
What did you mean by Christ in you?
CAMPBELL:
What I meant was that you must live not in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what you might call the sense of mankind—the Christ—in you. There is a Hindu saying, “None but a god can worship a god.” You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word.

(210-211)

MOYERS:
What do you think about the Savior Jesus?
CAMPBELL:
We just don't know very much about Jesus. All we know are four contradictory texts that purport to tell us what he said and did.
MOYERS:
Written many years after he lived.
CAMPBELL:
Yes, but in spite of this, I think we may know approximately what Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus are probably pretty close to the originals. The main teaching of Christ, for example, is Love your enemies.
MOYERS:
How do you love your enemy without condoning what the enemy does, without accepting his aggression?
CAMPBELL:
I'll tell you how to do that: do not pluck the mote from your enemy's eyes, but pluck the beam from your own. No one is in a position to disqualify his enemy's way of life.
MOYERS:
Do you think Jesus today would be a Christian?
CAMPBELL:
Not the kind of Christian we know. Perhaps some of the monks and nuns who are really in touch with high spiritual mysteries would be of the sort Jesus was.

(211)

CAMPBELL:
… There is an important passage in the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel According to St. Thomas: “‘When will the kingdom come?’ Christ's disciples ask.” In Mark 13, I think it is, we read that the end of the world is about to come. That is to say, a mythological image—that of the end of the world—is there taken as a predicting an actual, physical, historical fact to be. But in Thomas' version, Jesus replies: “The kingdom of the Father will not come by expectation. The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it” so I look at you now in that sense, and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me through you.
MOYERS:
Through me?
CAMPBELL:
You, sure. When Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be he,” he's talking from the point of view of that being of beings, which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us. Anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. Anyone who brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus, that's the sense of that.
MOYERS:
So that's what you mean when you say, “I am radiating God to you.”
CAMPBELL:
You are, yes.

(213)

MOYERS:
So, when a scripture talks about man being made in God's image, it's talking about certain qualities that every human being possesses, no matter what that person's religion or culture or geography or heritage?
CAMPBELL:
God would be the ultimate elementary idea of man.
MOYERS:
The primal need.
CAMPBELL:
And we are all made in the image of God. That is the ultimate archetype of man.

(218)

There is no way that Campbell's statements can be paraphrased. They have to be kept within the actual verbalization. Otherwise the interpretative wording will take away the spontaneity and the actual presence of the life which is contained in his words.

The main purpose of this [essay] is to place Campbell's statements about Jesus and his Father within the context which he himself indicates: in sum, the Jungian analytic psychology and its awareness of archetypes and the collective unconscious, the Hindu tradition, the awareness of the wisdom in the Ancient Near East (Egypt, Babylon, and the Hebrew tradition), the wisdom of structuralism in cultural anthropology, which makes one aware of the common denominators in all cultural myths, and the difference between the Gnostic writings and the orthodox canonical books of the Old and the New Testament. Where does that leave Joseph Campbell in his affirmation of Jesus and his Father?

Campbell's affirmation of Jesus and the Father is in his acceptance and his personalized interpretation of the metaphor, Jesus, and the metaphor, Jesus' Father. Much of his integration of the wisdom and spiritual life within these metaphors is according to the Gnostic tradition. His stories and references to the Gospel of Thomas and the apocryphal Acts of John reveal a personal delight. Nevertheless, Campbell's background is so voluminous and so complex that it would be incorrect to simply call him a Gnostic. For him the story is not real but the life of the story is. As such Campbell cannot be categorized within the story of the Gnostic tradition, because the life of the story is greater than its form.